*sigh* Note to self. Total immersion games don't go over well with judges.

I have to say that I'm rather surprised at the judges' interest in Roll4K. It's definitely a nice game, but I hadn't thought it would do as well as it did. Did that left-field anyone else?

Edit: Doing the average without Shelton's, I would have had a 95%. So I guess the game did generally go over well with judges. I hope that shelton tried running it more than once. Windows machines can crash for a lot of reasons.

that vote was a bit unfair, it took alot for me not to edit that to like a +50. gotta keep the contest honest, though.

Ah, well. It happens.

I'm wondering if we shouldn't develop some sort of procedure for this situation in the future? This happened a couple of times last year, and several games didn't get high scores because of it. JM4k in particular, got nailed because the judges had trouble running it.

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I mean, I can personally admit Warpstar4K is not a better game

Don't sell yourself short though. It's a pretty fun game once you get used to the controls. And the graphics are spectacular.

Edit: Hey Woogley, is there any way to see the results ordered by a given judge's rankings? Looking through the results, I find the wildly different opinions to be facinating. For example, borkert gave Bungie Bill a 97(!) while nonnus29 gave it a 70. It's really surprising sometimes what people like. I'd love to see each judge's thoughts on which were the coolest and the worst.

Speaking of which, let's give a round of applause to our judges! 55 games must have been a lot of hard work! Way to go guys!

>JM4k in particular, got nailed because the judges had trouble running it.

Oh yea... 46th place. I almost cried

Sheldon's vote also pulled me down a bit. Would be 92 without his vote, but its alright. Had to explain the concept like 20 times... so I can somewhat understand that not everyone gets the idea. (It also wasnt that finishing-blow-ish in my case).

Bad Sector's bad score surprised me a bit. It was one of my personal top5.

Bad Sector's bad score surprised me a bit. It was one of my personal top5.

I dunno. The gameplay was neat, but the first-person controls on an overhead game kept frustrating me. That, and every level felt the same.

I'm looking at Fish4K right now, and I'm surprised that more judges didn't get hooked by this one. I played it for hours trying to get to be the top fish in the pond. Of course, I muted the computer, so that may have something to do with it.

On fuzetsu, I really expected it to be one of the top 3, along with Miners4k. The concept is a little weird, but it was easy enough to explain to people. Once you realize how it works, it becomes incredibly addictive. In the end, I think it really comes back to how amazingly varied the judges opinions are. As these results show, it's very hard to make a game that everyone likes!

Edit: From JSquares, "shelton (+50): didn't play, took too long for the extra components to install."

Does anyone know what he might be talking about? As far as I can tell, the game doesn't do anything that might require special components.

My personal top 2 were Miners4k & fuzetsu. The platform games generally did better than I expected (Note to self - enter at least one platformer next year ). My top ten would have been a bit different, but then I guess I would be scoring originality (why didn't I think of that) & programming technique perhaps a bit mored strongly (It's the nerd in me ).

I'm happy with Speed4k's score (although I'd like to have placed higher). Frag4k was Ok. I thought KanaInvaders would be last, as I only entered that one for a bit of a joke really. Overall, my gameplay was sucking a bit. Need better gameplay next year

@jbanes I think Xero should have scored higher too. Terrible luck with the computer crash.

That's just an idea... When an artistic part is involved (I think this is the case here), you may have a love/hate meaning to the vote... It may be fairer to remove the extremes (I don't think it would have changed anything for Miners4k ) in the final count.

Ah, I see what you mean. I thought you meant to just hide the comments.

Not at all... The idea was to keep everything in place (have full access to the scores/comments given by the judges), just remove the highest and lowest scores (ex : for miners4K : remove 100 & 76 -> a final score of 97, for Xero -> 94.6)

Just goes to show how differently people see things. I thought Gravitator should have done a lot better, but it got bad scores for graphics and one judge didn't get it. I thought gameplay was very good though.

I would like to say a big thank you to all the judges. Your comments were very helpful in determining how to improve for next time. Not just the comments for my games, but also for everyone elses.

Thanks! A bit more constructive comment than "ok" would have been nice from one of the judges, or perhaps that was constructive? Congratulations to the winners, I don't agree with certain games ratings but in general they seem all right. Thanks to the judges, I had fun, see you next year.

Hey Woogley, is there any way to see the results ordered by a given judge's rankings? Looking through the results, I find the wildly different opinions to be facinating. For example, borkert gave Bungie Bill a 97(!) while nonnus29 gave it a 70. It's really surprising sometimes what people like. I'd love to see each judge's thoughts on which were the coolest and the worst.

Yep, that would be very nice to see. It is quite surprising and fascinating to see how diverse the opinions are Most (almost all) games in the mid ranges have scores ranging 60 - 90!!! Even Miners and (VERY unfortunately!!!) Xero got some real outside votes... (Xero is second placed in my book)

I agree with "Myself" about the scoring "just remove the highest and lowest scores". It seems like all the judges have a fairly equal share of "outcast" votes though, but might be easier to see with individual judge vote list, sort of like last years. Hint. That might also make it easier to see how JGO ppl and non-JGO ppl were voting. That also surpriced me a bit at first glance.

I have to say that I'm rather surprised at the judges' interest in Roll4K. It's definitely a nice game, but I hadn't thought it would do as well as it did. Did that left-field anyone else?

I agree. And only 0.3 from the top spot . I would have guessed top 10 but would not have put any money on top 5. But Kev seems to have the feeling for what really works and nobody will fail understanding the concept. Roll4K had no real outside vote and that is a big reason why it ended up so high in the list.

Easy to understand and especially control seems to be very important. Top 4 games are really quite simple games. Anybody here could probably produce a clone of those games in under an hour (with exception from Miners probably) but it also shows how important presentation and "feel" is to a game. The ball in Roll4K bounces just right. Ctrls in Goomba is spot on and surprisingly for me even when I coded it, the explosions in Balls made the game twice as much fun to play, even though it had no real effect on the gameplay.

Interestingly, my three entries wound up getting ranked in exactly the reverse order of the way I personally consider them. Gravitator is certainly a love-it or hate-it kind of thing. And thanks for the encouraging comments about it, gang! I'm definitely going to continue work on it and will post enhancements soon.

On judging and scoring, if you guys wanted to discard the highest and lowest scores (very standard in athletic judging), that's called a "trimmed mean". You'd want more judges (nine in the Olympics), I think, and that might be hard to do.

Hey Woogley, is there any way to see the results ordered by a given judge's rankings? Looking through the results, I find the wildly different opinions to be facinating. For example, borkert gave Bungie Bill a 97(!) while nonnus29 gave it a 70. It's really surprising sometimes what people like. I'd love to see each judge's thoughts on which were the coolest and the worst.

sweet idea. if you guys wanna see that, click on any game on the results page, and you'll notice the judge's names are now hyperlinks

My personal favorites were Miners, Fuzetzu, Goomba, Roll, Xero and Ares (in no particular order). I do think it's a pity that Ares got lowered that way; a trimmed median seems to be a good idea. Also, I suggest that next year, we encourage the judges to use the full scale (one of the judges gave 80 for games he didn't like, while Mahlokan used the scale better, giving 70 for games he liked but not having as his favorites. A couple of the judges hardly gave any game less than 50).

When an artistic part is involved (I think this is the case here), you may have a love/hate meaning to the vote... It may be fairer to remove the extremes (I don't think it would have changed anything for Miners4k ) in the final count.

No, there's no need to change the scoring. I'm very happy with the results of the judging this year, especially in comparison to last year. While I really hate losing on a technicality, it's simply par for the course in any competition. In this case I took a risk (full screen) that I felt was worth taking in order to make a better game. I ended up getting burned by it. Using sports games as a comparison, referees often swing the tide of the game by showing bias in making penalty calls. Such is life, and that's just one of the hurdles that competitors must overcome to win.

Granted, I would have loved to see how Miners4K and Xero squared off in the end. Sadly, the world may never know. Them's the breaks.

A much better solution for next year is to give the judges guidance on how to handle situations like the game not running. For example, the JSquares entry never should have been rated without the judge having the opportunity to run it. The game should have been put aside until the judge was done with other games, then discussed with the moderator (Woogley in this case) to see if anything can be done to resolve the issue. What happened may have been completely secondary to the game (extra components?), and it was unfair to the competitor not to take a second look.

What about using the median instead of just removing the highest/lowest scores? It's simpler and easier to explain.

From what I can tell, the median score already is the final score. The votes from each judge are tallied to a total, then averaged based on the number of judges. So the scoring is overall pretty fair. Extremes happen, and they show how much opinions differ.

BTW, Markus. Congratulations on winning!!! I really enjoyed the competition this year (including our friendly arguments ) , and Miners4K was more than a worthy competitor. Excellent job! I'm really looking forward to next year.

Median is taking the score in the middle and not the average. Say there are scores: 20, 30 and 47795. Then the median would be 30. In the case of an even number of scores you take the two in the middle and average em. Eg 10, 50, 60 and 100 would be 55.

BTW, Markus. Congratulations on winning!!! I really enjoyed the competition this year (including our friendly arguments ) , and Miners4K was more than a worthy competitor. Excellent job! I'm really looking forward to next year.

Thanks, and agreed.

The j4k competition is much more fun than it should be. I'm sure the kick-ass competition and good spirits on this board is a big part of that. :-)

For some reason, I suck very very bad at all games, though.Including miners4k.. Back when the timelimits in miners were a lot harder, people were emailing me screenshots of the bonus level.. I have no idea how they got there, heh.

For some reason, I suck very very bad at all games, though.Including miners4k.. Back when the timelimits in miners were a lot harder, people were emailing me screenshots of the bonus level.. I have no idea how they got there, heh.

Indeed. I've noticed that hard-core gamers almost always surprise the programmers on how well they can do at a game. This was something I actually counted on in Xero. Just looking at the high scores in Xero is enough to show how amazing the players can be. I was expecting high scores to be around 75,000 or so. But the scoreboard shows scores well over 100,000 points!

Congratulations!Miners4k was in my own personnal top 3 (with 'A spring in the air' and 'gravitator 4k')

Woogley -> Would it be possible next year to remove the best and worst note for each entry?

Just on a lark, I did a little statistical analysis.

I want to preface this by saying that the three winners definitely deserved to win, and I'm not recommending any changes in the results at all!

But this might be useful info for deciding on a judging system in the future.

If you remove the highest and lowest scores (the "trimmed mean"), the top three scores are: Miners4K, Roll 4K, and Xero.

Interestingly, the trimmed mean results (on average) in a 1.21 higher score for entries. Although there was a wide range. The best gain was +12.89 for Xero, and the biggest loss was -2.71 for Daleks4K. It's interesting that the change between mean and trimmed mean was usually positive: that means that there were more extreme low scores than there were extreme high scores.

If you use the median instead of the average (or mean), the top three scores are: Miners4K, Xero, and Goomba4K.

The three biggest standard deviations (on untrimmed scores) belonged to: Xero, Kana Invaders, and Daleks4K. These were games whose scores had some wide variations. The three smallest standard deviations (again, on untrimmed scores) belonged to: Goomba4K, Roll 4K, and Gandalf 4K. These were games with very consistent scoring.

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